1st Edition

Sport and Migration Borders, Boundaries and Crossings

Edited By Joseph Maguire, Mark Falcous Copyright 2011
    336 Pages 14 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    336 Pages 14 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    From Major League Baseball to English soccer’s Premier League, all successful contemporary professional sports leagues include a wide diversity of nationalities and ethnicities within their playing and coaching rosters. The international migration of sporting talent and labor, encouraged and facilitated by the social and economic undercurrents of globalization, mean that world sport is now an important case study for any student or researcher with an interest in international labor flows, economic migration, global demography or the interdependent world economy.

    In this dazzling collection of papers, leading international sport studies scholars chart the patterns, policies and personal experiences of labour migration within and around sport, and in doing so cast important new light both on the forces shaping modern sport and on the role that sport plays in shaping the world economy and global society. Presenting original case studies of sports from European and African soccer to Japanese baseball to rugby union in New Zealand, the book makes an important contribution to our understanding of a wide range of issues within contemporary social science, such as national identity politics, economic structure and organization, north-south relations, imperial legacies and gender relations. This book is invaluable reading for students and researchers working in sport studies, human geography, economics or international business.

    Introduction: Borders, Boundaries and Crossings: Sport, Migration and Identities  Section 1: Patterns of Migration and Sport  1. From the South to Europe: A Comparative Analysis of African and Latin American Football Migration  2. "Why Tax Athletes' International Migration?" The Coubertobin Tax in a Context of Financial Crisis  3. Moving with the Bat and the Ball: the Migration of Japanese Baseball Labour 1912-2009  4. From the Soviet Bloc to the European Community: Migrating Professional Footballers in and out of Hungary  Section 2: Bridgeheads in Migration and Sport  5. Preliminary Observations on Globalisation and the Migration of Sport Labour  6. Sports Labour Migration as a Global Value Chain: The Dominican Case  7. Net-Gains': Informal Recruiting, Canadian Players and British Professional Ice Hockey  8. "Have Board will Travel": Global Physical Youth Cultures and Transnational Mobility  Section 3: Experiences of Migration and Sport  9. Migrants, Mercenaries, and Overstayers: Talent Migration in Pacific Island Rugby  10. Blade Runners: Canadian Migrants and European Ice Hockey  11. Female Football Migration: Motivational Factors for Early Migratory Processes  Section 4: Identities in Migration and Sport   12. Globetrotters in Local Contexts: Basketball Migrants, Fans and Local Identities  13. Diaspora and Global Sports Migration: A Case Study in the English and New Zealand Context  14. Tries for the Nation?: International Rugby Players’ Perspectives on National Identity  Section 5: Impacts of Migration on Sports and Societies  15. The New International Division of Cultural Labour and Sport  16. Transnational Athletes: Celebrities and Migrant Players in Fútbol and Hockey  17. Out of Africa: The Exodus of Elite African Football Talent to Europe  18. Touring, Travelling and Accelerated Mobilities: Team and Player Mobilities in New Zealand Rugby Union.  Future Directions: Sporting Mobilities, Immobilities and Moorings

    Biography

    Joseph Maguire is Professor in Sociology of Sport in the School of Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences at the University of Loughborough, UK. He is a past President of the International Sociology of Sport Association and an executive board member of the International Council for Sports Science and Physical Education.

    Mark Falcous is Senior Lecturer in the Sociology of Sport in the School of Physical Education at the University of Otago, New Zealand. He is an editorial board member for the Sociology of Sport Journal.

    "...at all levels of sport, starting in the US with intercollegiate sports up through the professional leagues, the migration of athletic talent has grown exponentially in the last two decades. Editor Maguire and his colleagues (25 authors of 18 chapters) have been telling society this for years, but they say it best here. The global international migration of athletic talent is the new 'sports world.' Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, professionals." —CHOICE, E. Smith, Wake Forest University, USA

    "The greatest strength of the book, I suggest, is that it offers perspectives from a wide range of disciplines; chapters range from statistically orientated economic analyses to the figurational work of Elias and neo-Marxist economic dependency theory...Overall this book offers a wide-ranging introduction to sport migration. Subsequently, I suggest this would be an ideal text for an undergraduate paper on sport migration." – Sport, Education and Society